


The Strongest Hearts Are Made of Kyber

by Mauisse_Flowers



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Star Wars Fusion, Author Knows Nearly Nothing About Star Wars, Bucky Barnes is & is not Obi-Wan Kenobi, Darcy Lewis is Jyn Erso, Dr. Erskine is Qui-gon, F/M, Gen, Jane Foster is Padme Amidala, Multi, Steve Rogers is Anakin Skywalker, That's Not How The Force Works
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-17
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2018-12-16 09:25:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11825817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mauisse_Flowers/pseuds/Mauisse_Flowers
Summary: He's reading a story about space princesses and pod races to her when she remembers. It's the cadence of her dad's voice, how it rolls the word “stardust” over his tongue and lips. She sucks in a deep, heady breath of memories and exhales knowledge. She's no longer Darcy after that, but she responded to the name because her papa gave it to her.Right now, in a Galaxy close at home, quite a few of the MCU cast are Star Wars characters given a second chance at life by the Force. Whether it's to get things right or just live normally is still up in the air.





	1. Stardust

Darcy is seven and is sat in her papa's lap. He's reading a story about space princesses and pod races to her when she remembers. It's the cadence of her dad's voice, how it rolls the word “stardust” over his tongue and lips. She sucks in a deep, heady breath of memories and exhales knowledge. She's no longer Darcy after that, but she responded to the name because her papa gave it to her.

Years later, she wonders if her papa remembers too, looking just like she remembered him. As she grows up, she looks in mirrors and sees curly black-brown hair and blue eyes with baby round cheeks. Sees a person who is young and unscarred by war and doesn't know that life exists outside the little green and blue crystal planet. Darcy barely remembers her brown hair and eyes, sunburned skin and scarred hands and arms, how changing terrain barely phased her anymore.

She recognizes this as what it is. Wonders if the others were as lucky for this second chance to be something more than they were.

So Darcy does something meaningful with this new life. Or attempts to. She shies away from the sciences as she ages, though she does find herself looking to the stars and wondering, “Will I ever go back? Why do these people not know life so much like and different from this is out there? Does the Force need me here for a reason?”

She thinks of Chirrut’s words, long dead like the other Guardians of the Holy City, turned into stardust, once more a part of the Force, “The strongest stars have hearts of kyber.” They leave a bitter taste in her mouth, knowing now, ages too late, he spoke about Baze, Bodhi, definitely her, himself, K2-SO, all those mercenaries who ran into fire at her words (“Rebellions are built on hope.”), Cassian–

She doesn’t linger on the stars long enough to think further. She runs to her papa for a snack, runs inside away from memories she can’t address without another who knows what happened to keep her tethered to this new, strange, and yet all too familiar planet.

It’s when she applies to Culver she knows the Force is doing it. The Force, as she knows it, can’t make you do anything. It can only nudge you certain ways, make sure a specific paper stands out one too many times as you apply to college after college after college. And Culver is the one that stands out most. She doesn’t know why it’s Culver, but she listens to the Force and applies.

Darcy’s accepted and it’s maybe the best choice she could make. An apt description of the Force is that it isn’t always a “great big bag of dicks.” She thinks maybe Cassian would have laughed if she’d gotten to spend this lifetime with him, getting to know him, Baze too maybe. He seemed to have a partially vulgar sense of humor.

Darcy wishes she had taken even a fraction of time to learn about the men who’d followed her to the grave. Wishes she’d taken time to learn more about Bodhi and what the Empire made him do, about the missions Cassian went on and killed on and lead to befriending her on, wants to know why Chirrut had stayed in Jedha and why Baze refused to leave his side. Misses K2 and his oddly humored seriousness and robot snark.

She’s missing six science credits and cursing Earth for making it a requirement for Political Science (despite its name it’s got nothing to do with actual science, not the kind that killed countless lives in Jedha and maybe more after she died). She haphazardly applies to internships like her counselor recommends (though he recommended in a more orderly manner) so she can graduate on time, wonders when she became so scatterbrained with her life.

Two internships accept her but one is in New York, where too much happens too fast and even now that kind of crowd is too much, and the other is in New Mexico, Middle of Bum Fuck Nowhere (Puente Antiguo). The second internship is with a “crackpot” astrophysicist and Darcy, the secret masochist she is, decides it’s the best one possible.

She knows it’s the Force nudging her toward Dr. Jane Foster too, anyway. Darcy wants to know why.


	2. Sunrise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What was your name?” She asks, teetering between Jane and Padmé as she looks at the girl.

Jane smiles breathlessly at Thor when he pulls her close to him. Then he’s kissing her and Jane’s brain is short-circuiting in the least pleasant way. She shudders and Thor pulls away, grinning at her before twirling Mjolnir and taking off with a promise to be back.

Her smile is wiped off by the kiss and she already knows that, whatever this between them is, it must and will stop. She won’t become another royal pawn, and definitely not to a monarchy that had a king who, in his anger, would strip his son of his power and then let his other son try to kill the older. She watched democracy die once and won’t ever again.

In the desert heat, Padmé shivers, wrapping her arms around her middle and suddenly, unbearably aware of the fact she doesn’t have two lives growing inside her. Not anymore. Maybe never again.

Darcy walks closer, staring after Thor’s abrupt departure. Padmé recognizes the look in those deep blue eyes, realizes Darcy is not the skin she wears either. But unlike Padmé, Darcy does not have the face she once wore. It might be a blessing.

“What was your name?” She asks, teetering between Jane and Padmé as she looks at the girl.

Darcy’s head snaps to the side, like a crisp, dead branch being broken. Her blue eyes are big in surprise, warrior red slicked lips parted a fraction.

“I was Queen Padmé Amidala of Naboo.”

“I was just a little girl when you died.” Darcy says. “I was a no one living on a nothing planet. I was Jyn Erso, daughter of Galen Erso.”

“If there is one thing the Force taught me, Jyn,” Darcy’s eyes close, relishing hearing her name for the first time in a long while, “it’s that nobody is a no one in this vast universe. We all have a reason for being here.”

It’s a long time before Jyn– no, Padmé tells herself, knowing this woman doesn’t care for that name like she does hers. Not anymore– Darcy speaks.

“Do you love him?”

Darcy means Thor, but Padmé immediately thinks of Anakin. He had broken her heart and turned against all they (her, Obi-wan, and himself) stood for, but she still loved him. That she was sure of. That and the fact her life had been ripped away from her when she’d still had babies to raise and an Empire to run from.

“Thor? No.” Padmé shakes her head. “I have been killed once due to a forbidden royal romance. I will not be again. The man who came before him? Yes. With every fiber of my being.”

“You mean Donald Blake?” Darcy’s nose wrinkles and Padmé laughs.

“No. Not him. His name was Anakin Skywalker.” Padmé knows she sounds like a lovesick schoolgirl and doesn’t care. “He was and still is the only person I’ve ever loved recklessly.”

She turns, heads for the car. “Come on. We have work to do. And Erik deserves to know I’m not just Jane Foster anymore.”


	3. Sunset

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Different faces_ , Anakin thinks, sleeping under the ice for seventy years, _coming to grips with the monster he’d become and been reborn with a chance to leave behind, but the same souls_.

Steve was always aware there was something more in him, something bigger and more volatile and so much stronger than him. And being weaker and sickly didn’t stop him from picking fights with bullies, from taking a couple hits to the chest and face. He went at it with just as much fervor.

Meeting Bucky soothed that volatility in him, made him more in control of whatever that something more was. It made him better than he thought he’d ever amount to be, even with his mother’s kindness before that. Bucky is like a part of him he was missing, and now doesn’t have to act like he’s living a complete life.

They grow up like rapscallions. Steve with his bad ideas and Bucky with his less dangerous but just as bad ideas. Then the war comes and Bucky wants nothing to do with it while all Steve wants is a chance to punch a Nazi in the face. Something about Nazis screamed “bully” to him. More than even the Italians or Japanese. When Pearl Harbor happens, he’s livid that he can’t do anything. Then Bucky informs him that he’s become a Sergeant in the army, Steve is upset, both because it was something Bucky wanted no part in and his jealousy flaring up over Bucky getting to fight.

“Who’s gonna watch my back if you’re gone?” Steve jokes. “You’re the only one who keeps me from making too dumb mistakes.”

“Guess you’re gonna have to grow up a bit, Stevie,” Bucky jokes back. “Maybe find a dame who can temper you better than I can.”

Steve chuckles, wheezes from his asthma a brief moment later. After Bucky leaves for Europe, he tries again. It’s closer to home when he enlists for his fifth time. He’s caught this time. But when the doctor comes into the back, old and kind and clearly German, there’s a clear moment of familiarity from the man’s warm eyes. His smile is both reprimanding and caring.

He introduces himself as Dr. Abraham Erskine. And no matter what, Steve feels it’s not the man’s actual name. It’s something about the twinkle in his eye.

“Do you want to kill Nazis?” Dr. Erskine had asked him kindly, an almost knowing tinge to the edge of his voice.

“No. I don’t want to kill anyone.” Steve had then shook his head, emphatic. “I don’t like bullies, no matter where they come from.”

Dr. Erskine had smiled at that. Steve had been accepted to the military. There had been Peggy and Colonel Phillips with the training.

Then Dr. Erskine and him had talked the eve of the operation. A strong emotion had welled inside Steve talking to him, one of some profound familiarity, like his soul was screaming at him but he didn’t know what about. He wanted to hug Dr. Erskine, but he kept a wall up between them and so Steve didn’t hug him.

Then he met Mr. Stark, the operation happened, and that bastard Heinz Kruger had shot and killed Dr. Erskine. Steve hadn’t felt that volatility inside him since meeting Bucky. But watching the doctor, old and kind and knowing and someone he’d wanted to grasp at like a drowning man, die, Steve had seen red. He’d gone off after Kruger, shocked at how fast he’d been able to run but taking it in relative stride.

Kruger kills himself before Steve can’t get a proper answer. His chest stings where Dr. Erskine had pointed, right above his heart, and he wants nothing more than to scream and throw the Nazi’s body into the harbor. But he doesn’t. Doesn’t shed a single tear over any of it, that big presence of volatility, once so much stronger than him, now under control.

_“The serum enhances what is already there.”_

_Not everything_ , Steve thinks later, after saving Bucky, after losing Bucky, as he takes control of the plane. For a moment, he thinks of rerouting the plane to Germany, destroying everything Red Skull had hoped to accomplish with a sick, satisfying revenge.

But he doesn’t. That isn’t a man he wants to be. Steve keeps his course, aiming for the waters in the arctic, talking to Peggy. It comes up on him fast, and in the dark of his mind he remembers another life and why he felt different, why Bucky had soothed him and why Dr. Erskine saw him strangely.

_Different faces_ , Anakin thinks, sleeping under the ice for seventy years, coming to grips with the monster he’d become and been reborn with a chance to leave behind, _but the same souls_.


	4. Midnight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I don’t know why the Force led to us, but I think for once in it’s existence, it made a mistake.” Obi-wan practically snarls.

Bucky spends seventy-something years struggling to realize it is more than just him inside his shattered mind. Obi-wan spends seventy years hating the men who made him kill and turned him into a puppet. Depending on the day, it’s both of them bickering and fighting inside, and on others it is neither, crouched and hidden in the deepest corners because it is better than facing the reality that they no longer have free will.

Then one day they open their eyes and Bucky is bone tired of fighting, and he just sits there is his mind. Obi-wan yanks at him, tells him to do something because despite sharing a splintered soul he couldn’t control the body. Not properly, not yet. Only Bucky could.

“What’s the use?” Bucky demands as their body does its programmed job. “Even when we fight, they’d put us back in that damn bacta tank or whatever the hell you call it and start us over. And now they fry us if we talk back.”

“I don’t know why the Force led to us, but I think for once in it’s existence, it made a mistake.” Obi-wan practically snarls, only able to be this way with himself. One’s truest enemy is their inner-self, after all.

They pick up on the squeal of tires and something in Obi-wan quivers as Bucky seems to register what it is their body is doing. There’s a crashed car, and a man tumbles out. Bucky recognizes him. Obi-wan does too.

“No.” Bucky mumbles, but nothing comes out his mouth. Howard says something about Maria, about helping her. And then he looks up and Bucky feels tears welling up in his eyes, wishing he could claw his way out. He screams as Howard is shot and killed at close range, continues as Maria’s neck is snapped.

He can feel tears, great heaving sobs, echoing from his chest on the long silent road as he takes the packages from the trunk of the car and gets back on the motorcycle. Obi-wan is silent beside him, withdrawn at seeing himself kill a man he was meant to be friends with many years ago.

Bucky quivers this time, feels something inside him, that only his part of their shattered soul can feel, finally click in place that it’s no longer just him dealing with the fallout of World War 2. When they return to base, more innocent blood on their hands, Bucky covers them in tainted blood, too.

The memory shocks are upped, but neither really let it stop them. What happens is they’re shoved out, the body left on autopilot to follow whatever commands given. But they spend the time fighting for control back. Sometimes quicker than others.

They run into Steve on a bridge. Obi-wan screams the name “Anakin” and Bucky doesn’t get why. Because Anakin had a different face, a more boyish charm Stevie lost when he got the buff body. Briefly, he can feel it happen, Bucky looks down, away, processing what that could possibly mean seeing as he looks nothing like Obi-wan, and then autopilot is yanked back into place and he’s cursing up a storm.

When they’re able to get control back, it’s because autopilot malfunctioned.

“ _Because I’m with ya ‘til the end of the line._ ”

It shatters, Bucky hangs from the Triskelion for a moment before letting go, diving in after Steve. Obi-wan is the one to drag them to shore, setting the idiot down.

“We cannot stay,” Obi-wan mumbles, holding a dislocated arm. “We are too vulnerable and Hydra will be after us still.”

“I didn’t really learn much those seventy years as a spy, Obi.” He tells the ex-Jedi, staring down at Steve and mourning that he can’t stay and fix the dumbass up.

“Do not worry.” Obi-wan wanders off down the shoreline, soaking wet and looking for the perfect tree to pop their shoulder back in place. “I know.”


	5. Midday

“Reborn souls,” Frigga states when she meets Padmé and Darcy, looking over the two with a mother’s tenderness. Even years after living as Darcy and not Jyn, feeling a mother’s love she was robbed of twice makes her skin crawl. “How very rare and wonderful.”

Padmé’s eyes narrow, a step sliding closer to Darcy in the protective way she’d come to categorize as purely Padmé, not able to belong to really anyone else.

“Yeah, what of it?’ Darcy asks, always one for tact.

“It is strange, is all.” Frigga’s eyes twinkle with something she knows and they don’t. “It is uncommon for them to find one another or awaken, is all.”

Something in her best friend’s stance shifts. Becomes beseeching. “Do you know who we are?”

“I could guess if you gave me names,” Frigga offered. “But otherwise, no.”

“Janie,” Darcy says with warning.

“Darce, please.” Padmé looks at her with big, intelligent eyes. They always remind her of Bodhi, how fragile and sad they are, but a fire underneath that could be sparked by the simplest thing.

She sighs, speaks first. “I was Jyn Erso. I was the daughter of Galen and Lyra Erso, the former who created the Death Star that–” She chokes, doesn’t know what happened after. It’s just been them, with their knowledge of before the Empire took the Galaxy and as it lorded over it. “That was meant to destroy planets."

“And destroy, it did.” Frigga says with a bit of sadness. “It killed many. The young boy Luke Skywalker destroyed it, and later redeemed his father Darth Vader too.”

“My son lived?” Padmé’s voice is faint, she looks ready to pass out too. “What about Leia? What happened to my daughter?”

“Leia grew up loved.” Frigga promises. “Both of them did. Leia grew up as the princess of Alderaan.”

Padmé frowns. “They grew-up on Alderaan? I have nothing against them, but that would put them directly in the way of Anakin.” The name stings. It always will. Darcy reaches out, touches Padmé’s hand briefly before pulling away.

“Leia Organa and Luke Skywalker grew up separately. Luke was raised by a farmer and his wife on Tatooine.”

Darcy had never seen Padmé look so decidedly murderous.

“And who decided that?” She demands. “Do you know?"

Frigga gives a calm smile, smiling. “Yoda and Obi-wan, I believe.”

“If I meet either of them in this life,” Padmé says with a huff, crossing her arms and looking very un-queenly, “they will feel my punch for the rest of their lives.’

Darcy grins a little. “Just make sure I’m there to see it, Boss-lady.”

Padmé turns to look at her and smiles back. “Of course.”

Frigga, watching them with an enigmatic smile as the women talk, motions ahead of her. "Come with me. You two looked tired and famished. There is a lot of history between then and now for me to tell you."

Neither woman needs to be told twice, following after the queen with all the eagerness of a scholar shown the world's largest library.

**Author's Note:**

> Also known as the Kyber Heart Universe. You can find stuff about this over on my tumblr. I'm lucid-dreamer-dreams


End file.
